We have to look at the word Social first.
“It always refers to the interaction of organisms with other organisms and to their collective co-existence, irrespective of whether they are aware of it or not, and irrespective of whether the interaction is voluntary or involuntary.”
I’m not so sure about the word “irrespective”; sounds a bit redneck to me. That’s what I hate about Wikipedia. Anyone can edit it, even redneck Jim.
Well, to start…in that sense, Wikipedia is a type of social network but, let’s leave educational means of communication out of the ring of social networking and, for this case, let’s leave out YouTube and Revver. They do have nice social methods (telling people their video is crummy). Let’s not go into all of that. Also, let’s not use Digg either; their methods of filtering the spam has eliminated most comfortable social connection.
So let’s nail out the big Social Networks.
Myspace . This has been known as the trailer park of the internet. Why? Well, because of the 1997 appeal. The place is full of the mouse tracers and sparkly profiles like Geocities had. Everyone adds every person they see on there as their friend. At one time, it was like a huge challenge to get as many people as you could get added to your friends. Then you spend the next three months weeding out all of the spammers and the real freaky people. It WAS an OK place to go and just read profiles. The profiles used to be like little ” I need a friend” resumes. Now, at most, they are nothing but favorite band lists. Really, why in the heck would someone list 200 bands. The ideal list would be, at most, 10-15 bands; not every dang band you ever listened to and didn’t want to smash your head with a hammer.
Then came the use of MySpace apps. MySpace apps are games that are connected with your MySpace profile. They allow you and your friends to join in and play against others and their friends. Great concept. For those who chose to not play the games on MySpace, there’s the bulletin board. In the bulletin board you could write a short story and share it with your friends and let them comment on it or re-post it. There was also the use of the “blog system” so you could write a long story and show your friends or even share it with everyone on MySpace. Some days you could get up to 2000 reads of a blog on there. I know I have many times.
MySpace also has the “mood” section, where you can show the world your mood and give a quick explanation of your mood.
The bulletins have been taken over by the friends who have MySpace applications. Some of the applications set to default the users to post to the bulletin and they do give the option to post to the bulletin, but most people don’t take time to read that junk and they just see the words “post click yes”, so they do. Now the bulletins are flooded with “billy bob just walked three feet”. Stuff no one cares about.
It is a clunky piece of junk that has not had a major overhaul, since…well ever. But, it is an OK place to find a whole lot of people.
Facebook. Facebook is a lot like MySpace, even though the platform it is built on is different. The people join there and add as many people as they can. There is even an application to allow people to see people who know people they know. This gives them a chance to locate someone long gone. This also leads to 1000 people going “wait, who are you?? how do I know you?” For years I called Facebook the antisocial network.
Well, Facebook is just like the bulletin section of MySpace, but you really have no other means of group socialism. It is hard to just meet random people on Facebook because of the way the place is built. They are working on that, but, at the same time, they are messing up bad by integrating many features that MySpace has.
Facebook now has Apps also, just like MySpace. If you have one friend who plays the apps on Facebook, then you have a million and one invites in your inbox, 200 app gifts on your main page, and the bulletin is flooded in updates in the user’s progress in whatever game they find the most fun.
“Facebook is really sucky, with all the app invites and gifts and games and crap taking up the only means of ‘social interchange’, this place is worse than MySpace, except the custom profiles.”
Yahoo Chat .”Hi, look at my profile and lets trade pics” spam bot link farm, full of regulars who do not like new people. All of the regulars have programs to kick other users out of the room, especially if the user is prettier, wittier or cooler than them. The regulars do not kick out the spam bots. This is the epitome of what everyone ever perceived a chatroom to be. It is not what chatrooms really were.
Twitter is like the Mood and status updates of MySpace. Difference is, the place is a farm of spam, get rich quick and stick it to the man. I have lost a bit of interest in this place also. It seems Twitter has taken another route since it became mainstream. It is not quite what it looked like it would be. Yes, it is a great place for all of your followers to get a notice at one time about what you are doing or about to do or about to be or just left. Yes, that makes it awesome. Especially if you are ,for examlpe, a musician and no one knows when your show is going to happen. Musicians miss that point. Some think it would be cheesy so they refuse to connect at all; and that makes them crappy and not heart effort musicians. If it ain’t from the heart, it ain’t music.
I truly miss MSN chatrooms. That was really Social Networking. You used to be able to join a chatroom and exchange wit and banter with with up to 50 people per room. The rooms were separated into many categories. Most were separated by location, like city and state. The city chats were always full to the max of 50 people. The overflow rooms were always full of up to 50 people. The chat rolled at such a fast pace, your mind stayed well exercised. I feel as if I am getting slower by the day because there just is nothing that fast paced left to do. I can’t leave one post and wait 6 days for someone to reply to it. It’s just way to slow.
MSN says they dropped the program because it was not that big of a money maker. They have to be kidding. They had rotating banners in every single chat. With 50 people in each room, and there being over 200 main rooms, they had some serious revenue flowing in. I think they tried so hard to be like Google or to beat Google, they missed out on what was really working for them. I swear, just a little bit of innovation for their chatrooms, and they could have potentially kept MySpace and Facebook from ever coming out of the ground. Heck, those places didn’t rise well and established until the chatters had nowhere else to go. Facebook was around for at least three years that MSN still had chatrooms. Now look at the place.
The number one thing I hate the most is a friend in my address-book sending me crap to sign up to. I hate that friend who is so stupid they sign up to a site and it asks them the password to their email account so the website can see how many of their friends are on that website’s services. I hate when that person comes back to me the next day asking me how they can get their email back from the spammer who stole it. I hate having to fight with and for them at the same time.